Billiards is a graceful game, and affords, in some respects, admirable training, but is hardly to be classed among athletic exercises.  Tenpins afford, perhaps, the most popular form of exercise among us, and have become almost a national game, and a good one, too, so far as it goes.  The English game of bowls is less entertaining, and is, indeed, rather a sluggish sport, though it has the merit of being played in the open air.  The severer British sports, as tennis and rackets, are scarcely more than names, to us Americans.

Passing now to outdoor exercises, (and no one should confine himself to in-door ones,) we hold with the Thalesian school, and rank water first.  Vishnu Sarma gives, in his apologues, the characteristics of the fit place for a wise man to live in, and enumerates among its necessities first “a Rajah” and then “a river.”  Democrats as we are, we can dispense with the first, but not with the second.  A square mile even of pond water is worth a year’s schooling to any intelligent boy.  A boat is a kingdom.  We personally own one,—­a mere flat-bottomed “float,” with a centre-board.  It has seen service,—­it is eight years old,—­has spent two winters under the ice, and been fished in by boys every day for as many summers.  It grew at last so hopelessly leaky, that even the boys disdained it.  It cost seven dollars originally, and we would not sell it to-day for seventeen.  To own the poorest boat is better than hiring the best.  It is a link to Nature; without a boat, one is so much the less a man.

Sailing is of course delicious; it is as good as flying to steer anything with wings of canvas, whether one stand by the wheel of a clipper-ship, or by the clumsy stern-oar of a “gundalow.”  But rowing has also its charms; and the Indian noiselessness of the paddle, beneath the fringing branches of the Assabeth or Artichoke, puts one into Fairyland at once, and Hiawatha’s cheemaun becomes a possible possession.  Rowing is peculiarly graceful and appropriate as a feminine exercise, and any able-bodied girl can learn to handle one light oar at the first lesson, and two at the second; this, at least, we demand of our own pupils.

Swimming has also a birdlike charm of motion.  The novel element, the free action, the abated drapery, give a sense of personal contact with Nature which nothing else so fully bestows.  No later triumph of existence is so fascinating, perhaps, as that in which the boy first wins his panting way across the deep gulf that severs one green bank from another, (ten yards, perhaps,) and feels himself thenceforward lord of the watery world.  The Athenian phrase for a man who knew nothing was, that he could “neither read nor swim.”  Yet there is a vast amount of this ignorance; the majority of sailors, it is said, cannot swim a stroke; and in a late lake disaster, many able-bodied men perished by drowning, in calm water, only half a mile from shore.  At our watering-places it is rare to see a swimmer venture out more than a